Turner Warns Students About Afro Review

"People concerned about the Afro-American Studies program at Harvard will have to be diligent in their observation of the way the (Departmental) review gets structured," James Turner, director of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell, said yesterday.

Turner spoke to receptive crowd of about 130 people in Harvard Hall.

In a speech sponsored by the Afro-American Studies Department, Turner outlined the history of the black student movement during the sixties, and its relationship to the development of Afro-American studies programs at predominately white universities.

Turner concluded his address by stressing that "black students have to come to serious terms with what it mean to be a student (because) there is very I important work for black students today."

In chronicling the black student movement of the sixties. Turner divided it into two phases. He said the first phase was centered in the South and desk with social issues outside of the university. The second was a Northern-based thrust, representing the efforts of black students in predominately white colleges to come to terms with "the basic question of black studies and the control and nature of the university," Turner said.

Turner, who become the first black head of Cornell's Afro-American studies program after an armed demonstration by black students in 1969, emphasized the proportional relationship between black student activism and the initiation of black studies programs.

On those white campuses "where black students were weak, black studies programs are also weak, black studies problems of organization and autonomy," Turner said.

Many of the problems that have beset black studies departments might have been avoided, he said, if black intellectuals had not felt that by supporting black studies they would have been risking their professional standing within the white dominated academic establishment.

Turner cited this insecurity as the reason why there is "no serious American scholastic tradition similar to Frants Fanon's psychologizing about the effects of racism and colonialism on black people."